


But While There's Moonlight and Music

by Zabbers



Category: The Hour
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-07
Updated: 2015-01-07
Packaged: 2018-03-06 12:47:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3135035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Randall and Lix, dancing and counting memories.</p>
            </blockquote>





	But While There's Moonlight and Music

The first time--it’s not really the first time he ever sees her, but there is a way in which the quality of the seeing is as of a vision, as of a first time--the first time, she’s dancing. A band of sorts makes its home at the Hotel Florida, and she’s a lithe, electrifying figure at the centre of a whirl of laughter and motion, admirers all around her, as tall as any of them in her dancing shoes, and she dances, of course she does, with every one of them. 

Randall doesn’t know if Lix catches the light or casts it. Only that it shines like the moon through a thousand mirrors suspended, shifting, in a window.

It’s one month, five days later, longer than it takes for that body to go dark and then fill again, it’s yet another idle evening gathered like coddled hostages in the lobby bar, when Lix approaches him. She deposits her glass and a half-empty bottle of whisky on his table and drops into the chair opposite his, crosses legs that are long and sure in the trousers she’s taken up wearing all the time now. Looks at him for a long while down her sharp nose and out of sharper eyes as though she’s simply waiting for him. 

At last, she leans forward. “I want you to dance with me.” 

There is a long interval before he has anything to say to that. And when he does, it’s an observation, a pointing out of fact: “You’ve danced with everyone else.” 

“I have, but that isn’t why I want you to dance.”

“Then, why?”

“Because I want to dance with you. Because I think you like me. I hope you do. If you won’t dance with me, if you won’t dance, then have a drink with me.”

As backdrop to their conversation, a melody on the mistuned upright. Lix is often the one to play this piano, but she seems to have convinced someone else to take over for the duration of her campaign. In Randall’s recollection, although he knows it must be false, the tune is unaccountably apt. Irving Berlin, Fred Astaire, 'Let’s Face the Music and Dance'. Perhaps. He counts five measures, and when she is still waiting at the end of the fifth measure, still watching him earnestly and patiently, he reaches for the bottle, pulls the stopper from the neck, pours for both of them.

Then, somehow, just like that, they are dancing.

Lix’s skin is pale and just a little sunburnt under the illumination of his drunken glow; her breath stutters out of her in breathless delight at his staggering audacities. Among the things he murmurs in her ear, he doesn’t tell her he doesn't know how to dance with a beam of angled light.

Later still, when this hard-drinking gaiety has been filed away, when swagger gives way to principle--for they are all idealists of one sort or the other in Madrid, in Barcelona, in Bilbao--and anyone who remains remains to work or to fight or is engaged in some grim irreconcilable act of compromise between the two; when they are surrounded by little more than rubble and dust, there is a gramophone. 

Lix climbs out of bed, unfurling like a flowering vine, goes over to crank the arm and drop the needle, the song seeming to pick up where it last left off. She lights a cigarette and moves to sit on the edge of the bed as she does in the mornings, but changes her mind and her trajectory, heading instead for Randall, who is at the desk, pretending not to watch all of this. 

Her hands, when she reaches to pull him out of the chair, are insistent. Here in this room, they compose a picture, a certainty he feels nowhere outside of it. She fits so easily into his embrace it’s strange to think there was a time he didn’t know how to hold her. He curls an arm around her back and with the other entwines their fingers, keeps them clasped and close.

They need no words to tell each other this story. They have learned it with their bodies. They stand there, swaying, in the space past the end of the bed, stepping in a slow, small circle while the record turns, while the world outside writes a prologue to its own ending.

But in Paris this is a book that’s still waiting to be opened, in Paris the spectre of war is a threat as yet not a reality. Tanks don’t line the streets and walls are safe for leaning on. It’s April; trees are in flower (it’s years before Randall realises that spring is the way peacetime Paris likes to paint herself in memory, regardless of the season--a trick agreed on by all who love her); and this is the last time they’ll make it out of Spain before the end of its war if they hope to sneak back in again. 

Randall feels out of place in this city, after months of a kind of personal freedom, the freedom to be the way he needs to be, with none caring to scrutinise him, not when there are tyrants and bullets to worry about. But swept pavements and intact buildings do him no favours, where he is once again that odd and anxious one, the one who can’t leave well enough alone. He feels dusty, overexposed, and as though unused to speaking. 

Five times, and five times again, he arranges his bow tie. Fives times, he brushes his hands over his lapel, gives each of his cufflinks five quarter-turns. 

But Lix at dinner is a sight that has him forget his compulsions, however temporary this reprieve. Lix at La Grosse Pomme is the Lix of the first time, and also a Lix Randall has never seen, in the imaginary life they’ve made for themselves in the middle of a civil war. She, too, has undergone a restoration. She, too, is no longer the dirt-smudged revolutionary of Spain and the fight that has bared them all down to the bulb. 

And Randall sees that she had always been this woman, and never, that he had known her from the first, and never will. In evening gown, the long line of her neck and shoulder and the curve of her spine framed as if they were a painting, her hair tamed and her curls set, body languid and sinuous, she belongs in a way that he cannot, though she laughs at the glitter, at the pact this clean, bright city wants so desperately to keep with its own illusions. 

She laughs at him, too, over the strummed strains of Django Reinhardt’s hot club jazz; then leads him to the ballroom floor, where her skin beneath his palms is strange again, soft against silk and sequins.

Five times and five and five once more, and when she is transformed, when she is Lix and somehow also not Lix tired and sick and distracted with the weight of their child, it is he who takes her in his arms. He who takes her hand in the silence and leads her through the steps and steps down after a fight, calls the ceasefires. He who’s desperate not to lose her, not to lose them, not to lose: this dream suspended in moonlight. 

Her breath in morning air. Her breath against his skin. Her hands like wings on the frets of his solitude. And when he does anyway, when it’s he who has to walk away (because neither is willing to lose their war or its freedoms), the silence lingers on, though the melody reflects and refracts through his mind blindingly, brighter with every repetition.

Five times becomes twenty-five, twenty-five a tally of days that become years, that become one more thing Randall tries not to track, and finds he can’t help but count. In his recollections she is white hands wandering along a keyboard, cigarette between two fingers, then tucked between her lips, burning low. She’s the first time they held each other, drunk on daring and impetuous as music, and the last time, in the wistfulness of reflected radiance, and all the times in between, trembling, as the song almost says, on the brink of an evening and the hush of a promised glow. 

She’s love like light in springtime morning; loss in summer, heavy and hot; and the grief of a long, dark winter.

“I want you to dance with me.” 

He looks up at the sound of her voice, carrying through his reminiscences. His reverie of fixations. 

“If you won’t drink, then dance.”

Lix uncurls herself from the crook of his lounger, where she has been reading, crosses to the radio, a look of determination on her face. In the last month (premature; short those extra days), they have said so much without saying anything, negotiated and re-negotiated the terms of a treaty and reached, again and again, an impasse. 

The music from the radio is thin but fills the room. ‘Til We Meet Again’ is once again too topical to be real except it’s the theme of a story that is so much like theirs and not theirs at all, like too many stories of their time, the private ones they never were much interested in telling. Maybe they should have been. Maybe they would have learned how not to let their war linger so long after the return of peace.

Randall watches from his desk as Lix reaches her hands towards him, hands that simply invite and wait, suspended between them. 

“You’ve danced with everyone else?” He looks at her over the rim of his glasses, at her silhouette, backlit, her figure in shadow. Sees on her features that she is in earnest, if unsure.

She ducks and smiles wryly: she remembers, then. “No. But we’ve tried everything else. I want to...I’d like to dance with you.”

They write their place together in the subdued dimness of his office, past the glow of the reading lamp. Together, they define the circumference of this truce, pace out its edges clasped close and careful like stepping through a memory, summoning its echoes. He’s hesitant at first, holding her with stiff formality because he feels as though it is his own body that is the stranger, not she (how could this woman ever be a stranger?), though hers is different now as well, weighted as it is by years and choices, muted. 

But then she softens into him--and all that weight is a warm and steadying thing, a ballast he didn’t know she carried. Somehow buoying him. Giving him substance in a way that remembrance never could. Making him light.

And so he softens into her. He bows his head and breathes into the space above her shoulder, and his breath reflects and mingles with hers as they exhale in time with one another, in time to this music that’s more to do with the harmony of the life they’ve yet to make than with the refrain from the radio. Less to do with the life they couldn't build out of dust steeped however much in moonglow than with the reflections that return to them after so many years.

It's moonlight and music. It’s the song they dance to, holding each other, now, each leaning into the other; and in their memories the first and all the other incandescent times; and until, later--much later--though by then he has lost count and gladly, the very last time.

**Author's Note:**

> [This fanfic is accompanied by a soundtrack.](http://8tracks.com/zabbers/but-while-there-s-moonlight-and-music)
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> 1\. _Cheek to Cheek_ , Leo Reisman and His Orchestra with Fred Astaire, Irving Berlin, 1935  
> 2\. _Let's Face the Music and Dance_ , Fred Milne, Irving Berlin, 1936  
> 3\. _They Can't Take That Away from Me_ , Fred Astaire, George and Ira Gershwin, 1937  
> 4\. _These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You)_ , Leslie "Hutch" Hutchinson, Eric Maschwitz and Jack Strachey, 1936  
> 5\. _April in Paris_ , Freddy Martin, Vernon Duke and E. Y. Harburg, 1932  
> 6\. _Minor Swing_ , Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grapelli, Quintette du Hot Club de France, 1937  
> 7\. _All of Me_ , Django Reinhardt and the Quintette du Hot Club de France, Gerald Marks and Seymour Simons, 1931  
> 8\. _All the Things You Are_ , Artie Shaw and His Orchestra with Helen Forrest, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, 1939  
> 9\. _Till We Meet Again_ , Bing Crosby and Patti Page, Richard A. Whiting and Raymond B. Egan, 1918, recorded 1956  
> 10\. _Let's Face the Music and Dance (reprise)_ , Fred Astaire in Follow the Fleet, Irving Berlin, 1936


End file.
